11 ms·

Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege

• MengerSponge 11mo ago
  "It can make quite a difference not just to you but to humanity: the sort of boss you choose, whose dreams you help come true." -Vonnegut Meta delenda est.
  • thfuran 11mo ago
    Ads delenda est
• 7e 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• JKCalhoun 11mo ago
  > To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said. I don't think it's even a stretch at this point to compare Meta to cigarette companies.
  • trollbridge 11mo ago
    Complete with the very expensive defence lawyers, payoffs to government, and waxing poetic about the importance of the foundation of American democracy meaning they must have the freedom to make toxic, addictive products and market them to children, whilst they simultaneously claim of course they would never do that.
  • yeahokbuuut 11mo ago
    [dead]
  • tqi 11mo ago
    Journalist love that study but tend to ignore the likely causal reason for the improved outcomes, which is that users who were paid to stop using Facebook had much lower consumption of news and especially political news.
    • majormajor 11mo ago
      What does political news have to do with loneliness and social comparison?
    • candiddevmike 11mo ago
      Teens don't care about politics for the most part and have absolutely horrible outcomes from social media
    • JKCalhoun 11mo ago
      That's a pretty good reason to leave FB though.
    • energy123 11mo ago
      Cigarettes aren't the only source of smoke
  • tap-snap-or-nap 11mo ago
    At minimum, Stricter and revised gambling laws should certainly apply to attention consumption where recommendation algo's are used.
• jeffbee 11mo ago
  The usual reminders apply: you can allege pretty much anything in such a brief, and "court filing" does not endow the argument with authority. And, the press corps is constrained for space, so their summary of a 230-page brief is necessarily lacking. The converse story about the defendants' briefs would have the headline "Plaintiffs full of shit, US court filing alleges" but you wouldn't take Meta's defense at face value either, I assume. https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/2025-11-21-Brief-dckt-2480_0.pdf https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/2025-11-21-Brief-dckt-2480...
  • pinnochio 11mo ago
    This is a weird comment to make, given that they're citing "Meta documents obtained via discovery." Doesn't seem like you're making this comment in good faith, and/or you're very invested in Meta somehow.
    • jeffbee 11mo ago
      Every time they contact me I tell Meta recruiters that I wouldn't stoop to work for a B-list chucklehead like Zuck, and that has been my policy for over 15 years, so no.
  • add-sub-mul-div 11mo ago
    You're not speaking to a jury. Regular people just living their lives only have to use their best judgment and life experience to decide which side they think is right. We don't need to be coerced into neutrality just because neither side has presented hard proof.
• thijson 11mo ago
  Companies can't really be expected to police themselves. I remember reading that oil companies were aware of global warming in internal literature even back in the 80's
  • MstWntd 11mo ago
    true that.. but it seems that they are fostering an environment for SA and even p3dofeelia.. Channel 4 news did a piece on it..
  • idle_zealot 11mo ago
    > Companies can't really be expected to police themselves. Not so long as we don't punish them for failure to. We need a corporate death penalty for an organization that, say, knowingly conspires to destroy the planet's habitability. Then the bean counters might calculate the risk of doing so as unacceptable. We're so ready and willing to punish individuals for harm they do to other individuals, but if you get together in a group then suddenly you can plot the downfall of civilization and get a light fine and carry on.
    • measurablefunc 11mo ago
      “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” ― Voltaire
      • candiddevmike 11mo ago
        See also: just war theory
        • measurablefunc 11mo ago
          People can manage to find justifications for all sorts of atrocities, including destruction of the biosphere.
          • 11mo ago
• rohan_ 11mo ago
  These discussions never discuss the priors, is this harm on a different scale then what preceded it? Like is social media worse than MTV or teen magazines?
  • Forgeties79 11mo ago
    Why does it matter? We can’t go back and retroactively punish MTV for its behavior decades ago. Not to mention we likely have a much better understand of the impact of media on mental health now than we did then. The best time to start doing the right thing is now. Unless the argument here is “since people got away with it before it’s not fair to punish people now.”
    • ares623 11mo ago
      Plus if we don’t do anything about it now, rohan_2 twenty years from now will use the same argument about whatever comes next!
    • JuniperMesos 11mo ago
      What policy proposals would you have made with respect to MTV decades ago, and how would people at the time have reacted to them? MTV peaked (I think) before I was alive or at least old enough to have formative memories involving it, but people have been complaining about television being brain-rotting for many decades and I'm sure there was political pressure against MTV's programming on some grounds or another, by stodgy cultural conservatives who hated freedom of expression or challenges to their dogma. Were they correct? Would it have been good for the US federal government in the 80s and 90s to have actually imposed meaningful legal censorship on MTV for the benefit of the mental health of its youth audience?
      • olelele 11mo ago
        I think passively watching something on television is very different from today’s highly interactive social media. Like instagram is literally a small percentage people becoming superstars for their looks and lifestyles and kids are expected to play along..
• hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
  I quit Facebook in the early to mid 2010s, well before social media became the ridiculously dystopian world it is today. Completely coincidentally, I had quit smoking a few weeks before. The feelings of loss, difficulty in sleeping, feeling that something was missing, and strong desire to get back to smoking/FB was almost exactly the same. And once I got over the hump, the feelings of calm, relaxation, clarity of thought, etc were also similar. It was then that I learnt, well before anyone really started talking about social media being harmful, that social media (or at least FB…I didn’t really get into any other social media until much later), was literally addictive and probably harmful.
  • smt88 11mo ago
    That's interesting. When I quit Facebook after years of heavy use, I felt no better or worse. The News Feed killed the positive social interaction on the site, so it had essentially become a (very bad) news aggregator for me.
    • hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
      I wouldn’t say I felt better. Which is why I found it so comparable to quitting smoking. A smoker doesn’t feel “better” after quitting smoking. Even over a decade after having quit I bet if I smoked a cigarette right now I would feel much nicer than I did right before I smoked it. However, I would notice physiological changes, like a faster heart rate, slight increase in jumpiness, getting upset sooner, etc. Quitting FB was similar. I didn’t feel “better”, but several psycho-physiological aspects of my body just went down a notch.
  • theoldgreybeard 11mo ago
    I quit Twitter/X about a month ago. Had the exact same feeling.
  • delis-thumbs-7e 11mo ago
    I never really liked fb or any other big application that much, so kicking them after 2016 was not that bad, but I used to be heavy user or forums and kicking some of them felt pretty similar to kicking tobacco back in the day. We are super social insane monkey creatures that get high on social interaction, which in many ways is a good thing, but can turn into toxic relationships towards family members or even towards a social media application. It is not very dissimilar how coin slot machines or casinos lure you into addiction. They use exactly the same means, therefore they should be regulated like gambling.
• isodev 11mo ago
  So does this apply to all social medias? (Threads, X, Bluesky, IG, etc) how come they didn’t have this evidence from their users well? Or maybe they didn’t bother to ask.. I suppose the harm from social networks is not as pronounced (since you generally interact only with people and content you opted to follow (e.g. Mastodon).
  • api 11mo ago
    The harm is from designing them to be addictive. Anything intentionally designed to be addictive is harmful. You’re basically hacking people’s brains by exploiting failure modes of the dopamine system.
    • Ozzie_osman 11mo ago
      If I remember correctly, other research has shown that it's not just the addictive piece. The social comparison piece is a big cause, especially for teenagers. This means Instagram, for example, which is highly visual and includes friends and friends-of-fiends, would have a worse effect than, say, Reddit.
    • SoftTalker 11mo ago
      What about it being addictive by its nature? I find myself spending too much time on HN and there’s no algorithm driving content to me specifically.
      • api 11mo ago
        I think there’s a difference between something just being a bit addicting and scientifically optimizing something to be addicting. Differences in magnitude do matter because there are thresholds in almost everything where a thing becomes harmful. Coca leaves can be chewed as a stimulant and it’s relatively harmless, though a bit addictive. Extract cocaine and snort it and it’s a lot more addictive. Turn it into freebase crack and it hits even harder and is even more addictive. If this is coca leaves, Twitter is cocaine and TikTok is crack.
  • aprilthird2021 11mo ago
• tbrownaw 11mo ago
  > In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta (META.O), opens new tab scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook and Instagram, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. Did they pick people at random and ask those people to stop for a while, or is this about people who choose to stop for their own reasons?
• sidcool 11mo ago
  Sad thing is that nothing will come out of this. Meta will go scott free.
• hinkley 11mo ago
  I already knew Zuck was a piece of shit before readying Careless People but holy shit.
  • fakedang 11mo ago
    > In a text message in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t say that child safety was his top concern “when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.” > Zuckerberg also shot down or ignored requests by Clegg to better fund child safety work.
• jmyeet 11mo ago
  One of the worst outcomes of the last 20 years is how Big Tech companies have successfully propagandized us that they're neutral arbiters of information, successfully blaming any issues with "The Algorithm" [tm]. Section 230 is meant to be a safe harbor for a platform not to be considered a publisher but where is the line between hosting content and choosing what third-party content people see? I would argue that if you have sufficient content, you could de facto publish any content you want by choosing what people see. "The Algorithm" is not some magical black box. Everything it does is because some human tinkered with it to produce a certain result. The thumb is constantly being put on the scale to promote or downrank certain content. As we're seeing in recent years, this is done to cozy up to certain administrations. The First Amendment really is a double-edged sword here because I think these companies absolutely encourage unhealthy behavior and destructive content to a wide range of people, including minors. I can't but help consider the contrast with China who heavily regulate this sort of thing. Yes, China also suppresses any politically sensitive content but, I hate to break it to you, so does every US social media company.
  • terminalshort 11mo ago
    Your solution to the government putting pressure on social media companies to censor is to give the government more power over them by removing section 230?
    • jmyeet 11mo ago
      I'm saying social media companies are using Section 230 as a shield with the illusion of "neutrality" when they're anything but. And if they're taking a very non-neutral stance on content, which they are, they should be treated as a publisher not a platform.
• Ozzie_osman 11mo ago
  At this point, I think all of the big tech companies have had some accusations of them acting unethically, but usually, the accusations are around them acting anticompetitively or issues around privacy. Meta (and social media more broadly) are the only case where we have (in my opinion) substantiated allegations of a company being aware of a large, negative impact on society (mental wellness, of teens no less), and still prioritizing growth and profit. The mix is usually: grow at all costs mindset, being "data-driven", optimizing for engagement/addiction, and monetizing via ads. The center of gravity of this has all been Meta (and social media), but that thinking has permeated lots of other tech as well.
  • stanleykm 11mo ago
    We have evidence for this in other companies too. Oil & Gas and Tobacco companies are top of mind.
    • rocqua 11mo ago
      It's a well worn playbook by now. But Meta seems to be the only one where we now have proof of internal research being scuttled for showing the inconvenient truth.
      • hopelite 11mo ago
        The tobacco industry also did that, but in many ways it also seems different, because where tobacco was something that has existed for millennia and was a scourge introduced to the world by the tribes of the “new world”; Facebook was a primary player in creating the whole social media space, something that effectively did not exist in the predatory and malignant manner that it was used for to create a digital panopticon, or more accurately and way worse, where your participation is required for a certain kind of success. Social media is abusive and utterly psychotic and narcissistic, because that is the type of people who created it using basic psychological abuse and submission tactics. Banks, casinos, games, hollywood/TV, news/politics, social media, contemporary academia and religion, etc.; they all function on being endorphin dealers/dispensers.
      • 11mo ago
• willsmith72 11mo ago
  I just hope that in 100 years time, people will be shocked at the prevalence of social media these past 2 decades
  • Aurornis 11mo ago
    I predict that in much sooner than 100 years social media will be normalized and it will be common knowledge that moderating consumption is just as important as it is with video games, TV, alcohol, and every other chapter of societies going through growing pains of newly introduced forms of entertainment. If you look at some of the old moral panic content about violent video games or TV watching they feel a lot like the lamentations about social media today. Yet generations grew up handling them and society didn’t collapse. Each time there are calls that this time is different than the last. In some spaces the moral panic has moved beyond social media and now it’s about short form video. Ironically you can find this panic spreading on social media.
    • delis-thumbs-7e 11mo ago
      We moderate consumption of alcohol, sugar, gambling, and tobacco with taxes and laws. We have regulations on what you can show on TV or films. It is complete misuse of the term to claim a law prohibiting sale of alcohol for minors is ‘moral panic’. It is not some individual decision and we need those regulations to have a functioning society. Likewise in few generations we hopefully find a way to transfer the cost in medical bills of mental health caused by these companies to be paid by those companies in taxes, like we did with tobacco. At this point using these apps is hopefully seen to be as lame as smoking is today.
      • justinclift 11mo ago
        > We moderate consumption of alcohol, sugar, gambling, and tobacco with taxes and laws. For the US, would it be accurate to put "sex" on there as well?
        • delis-thumbs-7e 11mo ago
• udev4096 11mo ago
  Who is surprised? Fuck zuckerberg
• pfannkuchen 11mo ago
  I don’t understand why things like social media are meant to be regulated by the government. Isn’t religion where we culturally put “not doing things that are bad for you”? And everyone is allowed to have a different version of that? Maybe instead of regulating social media, we should be looking at where the teeth of religion went even in our separation of church and state society. If everyone thinks their kids shouldn’t do something, enforcing that sounds like exactly what purpose religion is practically useful for.
  • olelele 11mo ago
    The Spanish Inquisition has entered the chat.
  • moshegramovsky 11mo ago
    Are you serious? People don't need religion to be moral. If what I see from religion these days is any indicator, I am extremely happy we kept our kids far far far away from it. From all of it. I will concede that not all religion is bad, but quite a lot of it is grift at best and cleverly disguised totalitarianism at worst. Many religious figures have absolutely no problem talking publicly about their "diety-given" right to dominate and control the lives of others for their own personal gain. I don't see how that fits inside any accepted definition of morality.
    • pfannkuchen 11mo ago
      I am not referring to existing established religions, I am just talking about the construct of religion in general. We are allowed to invent new ones, you know.
  • justinclift 11mo ago
    > If everyone thinks their kids shouldn’t do something, enforcing that sounds like exactly what purpose religion is practically useful for. Alternatively, being raised well by their parents and the Community around them. Religion is not a needed component of that.
    • 11mo ago
• u12 11mo ago
  > Meta required users to be caught 17 times attempting to traffic people for sex before it would remove them from its platform, which a document described as “a very, very, very high strike threshold." I don’t get it. Is sex trafficking driven user growth really so significant for Meta that they would have such a policy ?
  • aprilthird2021 11mo ago
    The "catching" is probably some kind of automated detection scanner with an algo they don't fully trust to be accurate, so they have some number of "strikes" that will lead to a takedown.
  • SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
    Of course it's not. We could speculate about how to square this with reason and Meta's denial; perhaps some flag associated with sex trafficking had to be hit 17 times, and some people thought the flag was associated with too many other things to lower the threshold. But the bottom line is that hostile characterizations of undisclosed documents aren't presumptively true.
  • delis-thumbs-7e 11mo ago
    We don’t know. But as you read from the article, Meta’s own employees were concerned about it (and many other things). For Zuck it was not a priority, as he said himself. We can speculate. I think they just did not give a fuck. Usually limiting grooming and abuse of minors requires limiting the access of those minors to various activities on the platform, which means those kids go somewhere else. Meta specifically wanted to promote it’s use among children below 13 to stimulate growth, that often resulting in the platform becoming dangerous for minors was not seen as their problem. If your company is driven by growth über alles à la venture capitalism, it will mean the growth goes before everything else. Including child safety.
    • FireBeyond 11mo ago
      Reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams is eye opening here, and it's pretty close to exactly that. > I think they just did not give a fuck. It's that people like Zuck and Sandberg were just so happily ensconced in their happy little worlds of private jets and Davos and etc., that they really could not care less if it wasn't something that affected them (and really, the very vast majority of issues facing Meta, don't affect them, only their bonuses and compensation). Your actions will lead to active harm? "But not to me, so, so what, if it helps our numbers".
• jackhuman 11mo ago
  I’ve recently had to deal with my father cognitive decline & falling for scams left & right using Meta’s apps. This has been so hard on our family. I did a search the other day on marketplace and 100% of all sellers were scams, 20-30 of them. Meta is a cancer on our society, I’m shutting down all my accounts. Back when TV/Radio/News paper were how you consumed news, you couldn’t get scams this bad at this scale. Our parents dealt with their parents so much easier as they cognitively declined. We need legal protections for elders and youth online more than ever. Companies need to be liable for their ads and scam accounts. Then you’d see a better internet.
  • olelele 11mo ago
    The old, mentally disabled guy in New Jersey falling over and dying trying to get to a date with a meta bot really broke something in me.
    • motbus3 11mo ago
      That was horrible. This also makes me think that all those researches on "unhappiness Vs spending"
  • cedws 11mo ago
    My grandmother has been through the same thing. She was scammed out of all of her savings by accounts impersonating a particular celebrity. Thankfully the bank returned all of the money, but the perpetrators will never be caught, they operate out of Nigeria (one of them attached their phone to her Google account.) Unfortunately these fake celebrity accounts are swarming her like locusts again. We tried to educate her about not using her real name online, not giving out information or adding unknown people as friends, but there's a very sad possibility that she doesn't fully understand what she's doing. It was emotionally difficult going through her laptop to gather evidence for the bank. They know exactly how to romance and pull on heart strings, particularly with elderly people. Meta's platforms are a hive of scammers and they should be held accountable.
    • Drunkfoowl 11mo ago
• Lerc 11mo ago
  There are certain statements that should make you wary of study findings. People who x reported y is one of those phrases. “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” This is the same argument you see in cosmetic advertising as "Women who used this serum reported reduction in wrinkles" If the study has evidence that people who x actually shows y, It would be irresponsible to not say that directly. Dropping to "people reported" seems like an admission that there was no measurable effect other than the influence of the researchers on the opinions of the subjects. Mental state can be difficult in this respect because it is much harder to objectively measure internal states. the fact that it is harder to do, doesn't grant validity to subjective answers though. I was once part of a study that did this. It was fascinating seeing something that appeared to have no effect being written up using both "people reported" and "significant" (meaning, not likely by chance, but implying a large effect to the casual reader).
  • crossbody 11mo ago
    Dude, who cares about study design and methodological validity! Let's just burn Meta down and put Zuck to jail! /s What you a saying is valid criticism of the study but people here already made up their mind, so they downvote. Another point to add is that 1 week is way too short - assuming there is an effect it might disappear or go in reverse after 1 month. To all downvoters: if you think of yourself as smart rational people, please just use search/AI to see for yourself whether there is high quality evidence of _causal_ impact of social media on kids/mental health. The results are mixed at best.
    • Lerc 11mo ago
      Interestingly the post is climbing it's way back to zero. I find the downvote without counterargument to be an odd response to a good faith post. It seems like it would strengthen the argument if the message they send is "I don't have a counter to this but I don't like it and I don't like that others will see this point of view" I have come to realise that I have a much higher threshold when it comes to upvoting, downvoting, or rating things. It seems like a lot of people freely upvote, like, heart, or downvote without a care. We live in a world where a 4.8 star rating (comprised entirely of an aggregate of zero and five star ratings) is considered a concern. So I try not to be bothered by it, but I'm pretty sure subconsciously a downvote hurts more than someone saying "I disagree"
• intended 11mo ago
  I remember reading case studies on the Tylenol recall. Meta leadership has had opportunity after opportunity to do the hard thing, and be the force for good in a manner that they can live with. Even more frustrating - the decision making shares give Zuckerberg control.
• Devasta 11mo ago
  Unironically, Zuckerberg and the rest of the top brass of Meta should be in the Hague.
• letmetweakit 11mo ago
  Meanwhile I'm sitting here deliberating for the 200th time to delete my Whatsapp account, meaning I won't take part in group chats with my friends anymore ... in the end I won't delete it and next up is deliberating for the 201st time to delete my Whatsapp account ...
  • ThouYS 11mo ago
    I deleted it a couple of years ago, leaving all group chats. Haven't looked back since. Everyone that is important to me (and not a slave, nor enslaver of their friends) is on Signal anyways
• motbus3 11mo ago
  Someone should include the owl really meme into this process
• zelphirkalt 11mo ago
  Of course they did. Anyone not blind to what is going on knows this, of course. It is merely a matter of proving it in front of the law. That's all this is about. It's no longer about the question whether or not they acted despicably. I doubt serious consequences will follow this time, as there haven't been following serious consequences all the previous times Meta/Facebook has been found guilty of crimes. However, it can serve as one more event to point out to naive people, who don't want to believe the IT person, that FB/Meta is evil, because they don't want to give up some interaction on it, or some comfort they have, using FB/Meta's apps or tools. I think it's a natural tendency most of us have. We use something, then we want extra good proof when someone claims that thing is bad, because we don't want to change and stop using the thing. Plus FB/Meta will do anything they can, to make people addicted to their platforms.
• dgpy 11mo ago
  "Priorities" quote: Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t say that child safety was his top concern “when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.”
  • pfortuny 11mo ago
    You need to be careful with those arguments because you can fall into the trap of "think of the children" for everything. As an example, I doubt any of us would appreciate any novelist of not focusing on saving children more than on writing books... But I get what you are saying.
    • bonsai_spool 11mo ago
      > You need to be careful with those arguments because you can fall into the trap of "think of the children" for everything In a text message in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t say that child safety was his top concern “when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.” Zuckerberg also shot down or ignored requests by Clegg to better fund child safety work. Fair point, but the fuller context is absurd—the OP's rendering is correct in tone and emphasis.
      • pfortuny 11mo ago
        OK, the context makes it clearer, right. Thanks.
• game_the0ry 11mo ago
  We need to boycott Meta. Otherwise, social media will destroy our children.
• barbazoo 11mo ago
  Big oil, big tobacco, big social, there seems to be a clear pattern of burying evidence of negative impacts of their products to satisfy some personal greed. These people are mentally ill and we need to help them.
• dbg31415 11mo ago
  Relevant. CEOs lie. Boldly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_ZDQKq2F08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_ZDQKq2F08
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• junglistguy 11mo ago
  [dead]
• asim 11mo ago
  We all know this. As people in the tech industry. As people on this website. We know this. The question is, what are we going to do about it? We spend enough time complaining or saying "I'm going to quit facebook" but there's Instagram and Threads and whatever else. And you alone quitting isn't enough. We have to help the people really suffering. We can sometimes equate social media to cigarettes or alcohol and relate the addictive parts of that but we have to acknowledge tools for communication and community are useful, if not even vital in this day and age. We have to find a way to separate the good from the bad and actively create alternatives. It does not mean you create a better cigarette or ban alcohol for minors. It means you use things for their intended purpose. We can strip systems like X, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, TikTok, etc of their addictive parts and get back to utility to value. We can have systems not owned by US corporations that are fundamentally valuable to society. But it requires us, the tech savvy engineering folk to make those leaps. Because the rest of society can't do it. We are in the position of power. We have the ability. We can do something about it. I wrote something to that effect two days ago on a platform I'm building. https://mu.xyz/post?id=1763732217570513817 https://mu.xyz/post?id=1763732217570513817
  • afinlayson 11mo ago
    At the moment the biggest hope I have is there’s client side tech that protects us from these dark patterns. But I suspect they’ll have their own dark patterns to make them profitable.
    • asim 11mo ago
      I guess we can speculate or theorise on potential strategies but beyond hope we should also try to do something. I have seen some X clones with variations but a lot of the same behaviour plays out when you have no rules around posting, moderation, types of content, etc. Effectively these platforms end up in the same place of gamification and driving engagement through addictive behaviours because they want users. Essentially I think true community is different, true community keeps each other accountable and in check. Somehow we need to get back to some of that. Maybe co-operative led tools. Non profits. I think Mastodon meant well and didn't end up in the right place. Element/Matrix is OK but again doesn't feel quite right. Maybe we should never try to replicate what was, I don't know. BitChat (https://bitchat.free/ https://bitchat.free/) is an interesting alternative from Jack Dorsey - who I think is trying to fix the loss of Twitter and the stronghold of WhatsApp.
• webdoodle 11mo ago
  They should have been shutdown and all the C-Level exec arrested after Cambridge Analytica. The weapons grade psyops they used too get Trump elected are crimes against humanity.
• dwa3592 11mo ago
  Social media has become a tool box for powerful people. They use it for public manipulation. Why would any powerful entity do anything against that?
• alex1138 11mo ago
  "Social media harm" sounds like one of these nebulous things which has no real definition "Social media was a mistake, just like the internet" oh ok so we should just give up our gmails and reddits and everything because people insist on the widest possible swathe of categories But actually when it comes to Metabook... I don't think Zuckerberg cares about anybody, and more to the point they refuse to give you a chronological service just for starters People have died and their friends haven't known about it because the algorithm never showed them. People have noticed messages they've got from people trying to get in touch with them years later, because Zuck feels you should be using Facebook all the time, not email https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 When your company is run by a megalomaniac this is what you get...
• bentt 11mo ago
  Meta is Zuck. Zuck is bad. Accept it everyone. Why people hate Elon Musk but not Zuck is beyond me. Zuck has done real harm as well, some of it worse than Musk.
• tlobes 11mo ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair HN has seen this quote many times; tech workers willfully or naively ignore the harm their contributions cause as long as the life changing paychecks keep coming, letting them pretend that they are too far removed from the damage to be responsible. Then comes the classic post “I’m leaving FAANG, so brave of me <quiet-part>funded entirely by the same extraction and harm I once insisted I didn’t see.</quiet-part>"
• notepad0x90 11mo ago
  Meta isn't a whole lot at fault, not that they didn't do wrong here, but that they behaved naturally, as expected of them. You should absolutley expect companies to do whatever it takes to make the most profit, so long as they don't break the law. As a society, this failure should be put entirely at the foot of elected legislators who have been entrusted to pass laws to protect the public. You shouldn't have to use less technology, quit social media, etc.. This things keep happening again and again, but by the time there are laws to do something about it, it's too late. At first I thought this reminded me of the tobacco industry, but now that I think about it, this is more akin to alcohol. You can't prohibit it, and you can only restrict it so much because of how abundant its use has become. But still, lots of lawmaking can still be done.
• Kate5477 11mo ago
  [dead]
• Grossenstein 11mo ago
  Social media is worse than using fentanyl